Mayur's Posterous http://agentm.posterous.com Most recent posts at Mayur's Posterous posterous.com Sat, 03 Sep 2011 18:51:00 -0700 Ubuntu 11.10 Beta 1 Overview http://agentm.posterous.com/ubuntu-1110-beta-1-overview http://agentm.posterous.com/ubuntu-1110-beta-1-overview

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Sat, 03 Sep 2011 18:47:00 -0700 Introducing Samsung Galaxy Note http://agentm.posterous.com/introducing-samsung-galaxy-note http://agentm.posterous.com/introducing-samsung-galaxy-note

I guess Samsung thinks there's a market for something like this.

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Sun, 21 Aug 2011 13:11:00 -0700 This is probably the most fanboy-ish thing I've ever done. http://agentm.posterous.com/this-is-probably-the-most-fanboy-ish-thing-iv http://agentm.posterous.com/this-is-probably-the-most-fanboy-ish-thing-iv

I love tech and I obsess over every gadget based on its merit but I never get into the whole fanboy craziness.

Q. So why did I put Android wallpapers on the iPads at my friendly neighbourhood electronics store?

A. Because I can.

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Sun, 21 Aug 2011 12:30:00 -0700 HP Touchpad at Sharaf DG http://agentm.posterous.com/hp-touchpad http://agentm.posterous.com/hp-touchpad

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So everyone knows by now that HP has pulled the plug on their Touchpad tablets only a month after its release. A 16GB Wi-Fi version used to retail for $400 but the same model is now being sold for $99.

Given this crazy sale price, everyone wants one now (as expected). It's impossible to get one in the States or UK (I didn't even know they sold these in the UAE). I took this picture at Sharaf DG and those guys have NO idea about the price cut. I feel sorry for the sales guy who spent about 5 minutes explaining the OS on the device (WebOS) and how this will be a strong competitor for the iPad. He thought I was joking when I told him that HP is discontinuing the device, even the manager confirmed that he had no idea about the price drop.

$99 roughly converts to AED 365 and would be an AMAZING price for a home tablet given the specs (scroll down and select "TECH SPECS"). Also, I'm pretty sure that a lot of people are working on Honeycomb to be ported to the device.

Now I gotta call them up every single day and hope for a price drop soon.

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Sun, 14 Aug 2011 09:48:00 -0700 Patrick Bolvin Releasing a “Kick-Ass Stop-Motion Animation” Video in October Featuring Optimus “Prime” http://agentm.posterous.com/patrick-bolvin-releasing-a-kick-ass-stop-moti http://agentm.posterous.com/patrick-bolvin-releasing-a-kick-ass-stop-moti

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Mon, 08 Aug 2011 11:56:00 -0700 Android App Turns Smartphones Into Mobile Hacking Machines - Andy Greenberg - The Firewall - Forbes http://agentm.posterous.com/android-app-turns-smartphones-into-mobile-hac http://agentm.posterous.com/android-app-turns-smartphones-into-mobile-hac
Dangerous hacks come in small packages.

Or they will, perhaps, when an app called Anti, or Android Network Toolkit, hits the Android market next week. The program, which Israeli security firm Zimperium revealed at the Defcon hacker conference in Las Vegas Friday and plans to make available to Android users in coming days, is designed for penetration testing–in theory, searching out and demonstrating vulnerabilities in computer systems so that they can be patched. Anti aims to bring all the hacking tools available to penetration testers on PCs to smartphones, with an automated interface intended to make sniffing local networks and owning remote servers as simple as pushing a few buttons.

 

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“We wanted to create a penetration testing tool for the masses, says Itzhak “Zuk” Avraham, founder of Tel-Aviv-based Zimperium. “It’s about being able to do what advanced hackers do with a really good implementation. In your pocket.”

 

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Fri, 05 Aug 2011 00:34:00 -0700 WASP Flying Wi-Fi Cellphone Hacking Drone http://agentm.posterous.com/wasp-flying-wi-fi-cellphone-hacking-drone-gee http://agentm.posterous.com/wasp-flying-wi-fi-cellphone-hacking-drone-gee

 

There are some people for whom being told that something is impossible is all the motivation they need. That seems to be the case for Richard Perkins and Mike Tassey, who were told that an in-flight hacking platform was impossible. In response, the pair plan on showing off their off their Wi-Fi hacking, phone-snooping, home-made UAV at the Black Hat and Defcon hackerfests in Las Vegas. They call their creation the Wireless Aerial Surveillance Platform, or WASP.

Built from an old Air Force target drone, the WASP packs a lot of technological power into a flying high-endurance package. A tiny on-board computer (Linux powered, natch) is bristling with hacking tools, along with a custom-built 340 million word dictionary for brute-forcing passwords, the BackTrack suite, a 4G T-Mobile card, an HD camera, and 32 GB onboard storage.

Just what does WASP do with those gigabytes? Originally, it was designed for Wi-Fi penetration — cracking network passwords while loitering above a target area. But the newly upgraded WASP can now trick GSM phones into connecting with its 4G card as if it were a standard cellphone tower. Once connected, the WASP quietly records any phone conversations or text messages while connecting the call via VOIP, thus giving the mark the impression that the call went through normally.

Keep in mind that nothing on the WASP is particularly new. The password cracking techniques have been around for quite some time, and the phone-spoof is based off a trick shown off at Defcon last year. But by placing them on a flying platform, Perkins and Tassey have shown that consumer technology and hacking techniques have progressed to the point where once untouchable targets are now vulnerable. In an enlightening quote from Forbes, they explain:

A military base like Area 51, Tassey points out, is surrounded by more than 25 miles of empty land to obscure it from outside snoops. “With WASP, we can cover that distance in about 20 minutes,” he says. “With radar designed specifically not to see birds, it’s very difficult to protect yourself from an object coming out of the sky and flying low.”

Not that they would ever dream of taking on Area 51, of course. Tassey and Perkins are both respected security researchers with lives and day jobs. Even when testing the hacking capabilities of the WASP, they took pains to ensure that they stayed within legal boundaries. They seem to have that motivation that has driven so many geeks, engineers, and tinkerers: Just to see if they can pull it off.

via geekosystem.com

 

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Wed, 03 Aug 2011 03:58:00 -0700 ‪Walt Disney's MultiPlane Camera (Filmed: Feb. 13, 1957)‬‏ - YouTube http://agentm.posterous.com/walt-disneys-multiplane-camera-filmed-feb-13 http://agentm.posterous.com/walt-disneys-multiplane-camera-filmed-feb-13

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Fri, 29 Jul 2011 12:00:58 -0700 Microsoft's internal Gmail parody video. http://agentm.posterous.com/microsofts-internal-gmail-parody-video http://agentm.posterous.com/microsofts-internal-gmail-parody-video

All Gmail has to do is point at Hotmail and have a laugh. Seriously.

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Fri, 29 Jul 2011 00:07:24 -0700 TouchPal Keyboard - the future of input http://agentm.posterous.com/touchpal-keyboard-the-future-of-input http://agentm.posterous.com/touchpal-keyboard-the-future-of-input

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Tue, 12 Jul 2011 10:23:00 -0700 In Robotics, Human-Style Perception and Motion Are Elusive http://agentm.posterous.com/in-robotics-human-style-perception-and-motion http://agentm.posterous.com/in-robotics-human-style-perception-and-motion

The task requires hardly any thought. But as Dr. Brooks points out, training a robot to do it is a vastly harder problem for artificial intelligence researchers than I.B.M.’s celebrated victory on “Jeopardy!” this year with a robot named Watson.

Although robots have made great strides in manufacturing, where tasks are repetitive, they are still no match for humans, who can grasp things and move about effortlessly in the physical world.

Designing a robot to mimic the basic capabilities of motion and perception would be revolutionary, researchers say, with applications stretching from care for the elderly to returning overseas manufacturing operations to the United States (albeit with fewer workers).

Yet the challenges remain immense, far higher than artificial intelligence hurdles like speaking and hearing.

“All these problems where you want to duplicate something biology does, such as perception, touch, planning or grasping, turn out to be hard in fundamental ways,” said Gary Bradski, a vision specialist at Willow Garage, a robot development company based here in Silicon Valley.

“It’s always surprising, because humans can do so much effortlessly.”

Now the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, the Pentagon office that helped jump-start the first generation of artificial intelligence research in the 1960s, is underwriting three competing efforts to develop robotic arms and hands one-tenth as expensive as today’s systems, which often cost $100,000 or more.

Last month President Obama traveled to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh to unveil a $500 million effort to create advanced robotic technologies needed to help bring manufacturing back to the United States. But lower-cost computer-controlled mechanical arms and hands are only the first step.

There is still significant debate about how even to begin to design a machine that might be flexible enough to do many of the things humans do: fold laundry, cook or wash dishes. That will require a breakthrough in software that mimics perception.

Today’s robots can often do one such task in limited circumstances, but researchers describe their skills as “brittle.” They fail if the tiniest change is introduced. Moreover, they must be reprogrammed in a cumbersome fashion to do something else.

Many robotics researchers are pursuing a bottom-up approach, hoping that by training robots on one task at a time, they can build a library of tasks that will ultimately make it possible for robots to begin to mimic humans.

Others are skeptical, saying that truly useful machines await an artificial intelligence breakthrough that yields vastly more flexible perception.

The limits of today’s most sophisticated robots can be seen in a towel-folding demonstration that a group of students at the University of California, Berkeley, posted on the Internet last year: In spooky, anthropomorphic fashion, a robot deftly folds a series of towels, eyeing the corners, smoothing out wrinkles and neatly stacking them in a pile.

It is only when the viewer learns that the video is shown at 50 times normal speed that the meager extent of the robot’s capabilities becomes apparent. (The students acknowledged this spring that they were only now beginning to tackle the further challenges of folding shirts and socks.)

Even the most ambitious and expensive robot arm research has not yet yielded impressive results.

In February, for example, Robonaut 2, a dexterous robot developed in a partnership between NASA and General Motors, was carried aboard a space shuttle mission to be installed on the International Space Station. The developers acknowledged that the software required by the system, which is humanoid-shaped from the torso up, was unfinished and that the robot was sent up then only because a rare launching window was available.

“We’re in a funny chicken-and-egg situation,” Dr. Brooks said. “No one really knows what sensors or perceptual algorithms to use because we don’t have a working hand, and because we don’t have a grasping strategy nobody can figure out what kind of hand to design.”

Dr. Brooks is also tackling the problem: In 2008 he founded Heartland Robotics, a Boston-based company that is intent on building a generation of low-cost robots.

And the three competing efforts to develop robotic arms and hands with Darpa financing — at SRI International, Sandia National Laboratories and iRobot — offer some reasons for optimism.

Recently at an SRI laboratory here, two Stanford University graduate students, John Ulmen and Dan Aukes, put the finishing touches on a significant step toward human capabilities: a four-finger hand that will grasp with a human’s precise sense of touch.

Each three-jointed finger is made in a single manufacturing step by a three-dimensional printer and is then covered with “skin” derived from the same material used to make the touch-sensitive displays on smartphones.

“Part of what we’re riding on is there has been a very strong push for tactile displays because of smartphones,” said Pablo Garcia, an SRI robot designer who is leading the design of the project, along with Robert Bolles, an artificial intelligence researcher.

“We’ve taken advantage of these technologies,” Mr. Garcia went on, “and we’re banking on the fact they will continue to evolve and be made even cheaper.”

Still lacking is a generation of software that is powerful and flexible enough to do tasks that humans do effortlessly. That will require a breakthrough in machines’ perception.

“I would say this is more difficult than what the Watson machine had to do,” said Gill Pratt, the computer scientist who is the program manager in charge of Darpa’s Autonomous Robot Manipulation project, called ARM.

“The world is composed of continuous objects that have various shapes” that can obscure one another, he said. “A perception system needs to figure this out, and it needs the common sense of a child to do that.”

At Willow Garage, Dr. Bradski and a group of artificial intelligence researchers and roboticists have focused on “hackathons,” in which the company’s PR2 robot has been programmed to do tasks like fetching beer from a refrigerator, playing pool and packing groceries.

In May, with support from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Dr. Bradski helped organize the first Solutions in Perception Challenge. A prize of $10,000 is offered for the first team to design a robot that is able to recognize 100 items commonly found on the shelves of supermarkets and drugstores. Part of the prize will be given to the first team whose robot can recognize 80 percent of the items.

At the contest, held during a robotics conference in Shanghai, none of the contestants reached the 80 percent goal. The team that did best was the laundry-folding team from Berkeley, which has named its robot Brett, for Berkeley Robot for the Elimination of Tedious Tasks.

Brett was able to recognize 68 percent of a smaller group of 50 objects. And the team has made progress in its quest to build a machine to do the laundry; it recently posted a new video showing how much it has sped up the robot.

“Our end goal right now is to do an entire laundry cycle,” said Pieter Abbeel, a Berkeley computer scientist who leads the group, “from dirty laundry in a basket to everything stacked away after it’s been washed and dried.”

 

 

 

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Tue, 14 Jun 2011 14:28:04 -0700 Google Search with Instant Pages http://agentm.posterous.com/google-search-with-instant-pages http://agentm.posterous.com/google-search-with-instant-pages

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Mon, 06 Jun 2011 08:32:00 -0700 iPhones control interactive billboard in Stockholm to win McTreats http://agentm.posterous.com/iphones-control-interactive-billboard-in-stoc http://agentm.posterous.com/iphones-control-interactive-billboard-in-stoc

Ah, Sweden. The land of Akvavit, crayfish parties and billboards that respond to your iPhone.

You heard that right. McDonald's, not exactly a hotbed of Swedish cuisine but a popular place to eat nonetheless, has installed an interactive billboard in Stockholm. Enter a special URL, and you can play pong on the billboard with your iPhone. If you can survive for 30 seconds in the game, you get a digital coupon for some treats at Mickey D's.

 

What's brilliant is that you don't need to download an app to play the game - just enter picknplay.se into a browser, and a web app checks your location to verify that you're near the billboard. You knew there was a good reason to keep Location Services turned on all the time...

Another game on the same billboard has you snap a photo of a McTreat with a phone (not necessarily an iPhone) to get a free goodie at a local McDonald's.

via TUAW

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Fri, 03 Jun 2011 10:43:00 -0700 Barnes & Noble NOOK Color hacked to run MeeGo Linux http://agentm.posterous.com/barnes-noble-nook-color-hacked-to-run-meego-l http://agentm.posterous.com/barnes-noble-nook-color-hacked-to-run-meego-l
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Thu, 02 Jun 2011 01:17:00 -0700 Windows 8 first preview http://agentm.posterous.com/windows-8-first-preview http://agentm.posterous.com/windows-8-first-preview

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Fri, 27 May 2011 00:39:00 -0700 Mobile Augmented Reality by Blippar™ http://agentm.posterous.com/mobile-augmented-reality-by-blippar http://agentm.posterous.com/mobile-augmented-reality-by-blippar

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Tue, 24 May 2011 10:18:00 -0700 NVIDIA CEO hints at Tegra 3-powered Nexus 3 http://agentm.posterous.com/nvidia-ceo-hints-at-tegra-3-powered-nexus-3 http://agentm.posterous.com/nvidia-ceo-hints-at-tegra-3-powered-nexus-3
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This is what the Tegra 3 Kal-El processor is capable of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_Tegra#Tegra_.28Kal-El.29_series

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Thu, 12 May 2011 13:55:00 -0700 Bloomframe® - balcony http://agentm.posterous.com/bloomframe-balcony http://agentm.posterous.com/bloomframe-balcony

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Wed, 11 May 2011 03:52:00 -0700 Android@Home Lets You Control Your Lights & Appliances Wirelessly http://agentm.posterous.com/androidhome-lets-you-control-your-lights-appl http://agentm.posterous.com/androidhome-lets-you-control-your-lights-appl

 

Google has just unveiled the Android@Home framework, a set of protocols for controlling light switches, alarm clocks and other home appliances through any Android device.

The search giant’s ambitious plan intends to turn the home into one connected device. During a demo Tuesday at Google I/O in San Francisco, the company showed off the capability to control lights via an Android tablet. Android@Home essentially makes it possible to control wireless or connected devices.

Google also showed off a new type of Android device: a home theater system called “Project Tungsten.” Google rigged several speakers to the Android OS and, using an Android tablet, controls the speaker system. Google also demonstrated how the system can start playing music just by swiping a near-field communication-enabled CD case in front of the “Project Tungsten” setup.

Don’t expect to be controlling your home light switches with Android@Home next week, though. Google has partnered with companies such as LightingScience to bring compatible appliances and devices to the market, but they won’t debut until the end of the year.

Google unveiled the framework now so that developers can get a head start on building apps on top of the new protocols.

via mashable.com

 

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Tue, 10 May 2011 19:43:00 -0700 Google I/O 2011: Keynote Day One http://agentm.posterous.com/google-io-2011-keynote-day-one http://agentm.posterous.com/google-io-2011-keynote-day-one

Android 2.4 "Ice Cream Sandwich" confirmed!

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